TIMS President, 1985-1986
H. Martin Weingartner was the 32nd President of TIMS. He had previously (1978-84) been Vice President Finance (1978-1984) of TIMS. At the time of his service to TIMS he was the Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Finance at the Owen Graduate School of Management of Vanderbilt University. He had been on the faculties of the University of Rochester, MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. A Carnegie Tech Ph.D., he studied under William W. Cooper, Merton H. Miller, Franco Modigliani, Herbert Simon and others well known to the Management Science/Operations Research community. His research reflected the application of O.R. techniques to financial problems of corporations, such as his use of linear, integer NSD dynamic programming methods to capital budgeting decisions, among others.
While VP-Finance, he reorganized the investment function of TIMS, ending the policy of using low interest Certificates of Deposit exclusively and investing in stock mutual funds to considerable advantage of the organization. With the aid of an investment committee, spear-headed by Herbert Ayers, the investment advisor Stein, Roe & Farnhum was selected to deploy funds not needed for operating purposes among SR&F mutual funds. At the same time, TIMS funds were divided into an Operating Fund and a Quasi Endowment Fund, the latter designated for new initiatives such as new journals, and for emergencies. A super-majority of Council was required to spend from the Quasi-Endowment, protecting it from encroachment for operating purposes. Thus TIMS was able to undertake new initiatives or take advantage of a number of opportunities as they arose. Among these was the expansion of OR/MS Today some time later. Weingartner continued to chair the TIMS Investment Committee for many years, with academic and industry financial experts as members, which contributed to the growth of the financial health of the organization.
During his presidential term, Weingartner completed the process of “unbundling” the journals, so that members could elect and pay only for those journals or section memberships that met their needs. As President, he also became the TIMS member of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, an organization that meets in Washington, hears reports about national science policy and meets with members of Congress at a breakfast.
In response to a request from the chairman of one Congressional subcommittee, Weingartner first organized and chaired an ad-hoc committee, then wrote a report and testified before the Congressional Science Subcommittee on government policy with regard to outsourcing vs. continued government publication of various statistical publications.
Weingartner retired from Vanderbilt University in 1998, but continued as an Alumni Member of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. He passed away on May 6, 2014.
BA, BS, MA, Chicago, MS, PhD (Economics), Carnegie Mellon, 1962